


Rerezzed

by Rinzler



Category: Tron (1982), Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-02
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-02-19 16:09:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2394629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rinzler/pseuds/Rinzler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death is a finality. Deresolution is not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Flynn dreamed of the Grid.

Every night for the past few weeks, it had occupied his thoughts. Piloting a Recognizer across uneven ground and through winding chasms, glittering pools of energy flowing deep beneath the surface, a small room full of light circles with a ball of pure energy bouncing back and forth. Even the gridbugs- spider-like creatures in a sickly shade of green, skittering across the ground and consuming everything in their path.

The thoughts left him feeling exhilarated, eager to pursue a new program or project for Encom. He would wake up relaxed, secure in the knowledge he had won, he had defeated the MCP and reclaimed ownership of his video games. For a while, the dreams were better than the waking world, which was filled with endless stacks of paperwork and meetings and a board who only cared about profits and nothing else. As long as Flynn was asleep, he was invincible. He was larger than life, a hero, the best program to set foot on the Grid. He could destroy and create as much as he wanted. He was happy.

And then he began to dream of Ram.

.......

_He was climbing through the outlands with Tron and Ram, the uncoded sections of the grid with sharp, angular walls and floors that shone like a cross between quartz and mirrors. Flynn was walking behind the two, perfectly content to let them set the pace._

_Then Ram had staggered and fallen, crashing down a steep incline towards a pool of energy. Flynn had tried to run towards him, but suddenly the ground under his feet grew upwards, solidly encasing his legs in streams of code, glowing red. He had opened his mouth to scream for Tron, only to turn around and see him shaking with laughter, circuits flickering from red to blue before settling on red. Then Flynn blinked, and it was Sark laughing at him._

_“Go,” he sneered, “Help the worthless program! See if he still believes in what you are!”_

_The code binding Flynn's legs had disintegrated and he had run, tumbling, staggering down as fast as he could, but he couldn't reach Ram, who was somehow still falling. He had run faster and faster and Sark's laughter had echoed louder and louder, drowning out the sound of his harsh panting breaths and his cry of “NO!” when Ram had hit the surface of the energy pool and sunk in._

_He skidded to a stop and plunged his arm in, trying to grasp at Ram, but his hand had closed around the program's identity disc and he had ripped it clean off. The disc flickered before becoming a glowing ball of light, rising out of the pool as Ram sank deeper, out of Flynn's reach._

_He whipped around to glare at Sark, but the ground under his feet fractured and then he was falling, falling-_

And waking up in a cold sweat, shivering violently and feeling like his hand was on fire where he'd touched Ram's identity disc.

.......

The next few times Flynn dreamed of Ram were different, but the ending was always the same. Ram would disintegrate in Flynn's arms, choking on his words, energy humming beneath Flynn's hands as his form flickered and faded.

Sometimes Flynn would dream about crawling out of the lightcycle wreckage to find Ram, sprawled on his back with his neck bent at an odd angle, breathing labored and irregular, attempting to tell Flynn something but collapsing completely before he could. Sometimes he would turn around on the Recognizer and find Ram already almost completely gone, and would only reach him just as he burned up. Sometimes, rarely- but sometimes- he would dream of facing Ram in the games, desperately trying not to derezz him only to end up cradling him in his arms after a misfired shot, Ram's eyes full of betrayal and pain.

Flynn would always wake up feeling like his arms were burning with the raw energy released as Ram disintegrated into his arms, barely being able to breathe from the weight of the guilt on his chest at letting Ram die. Ram, his friend. The actuarial program who was never meant to be a warrior but became one anyway because it was the only option, who would have been perfectly happy helping Users for the rest of his time in the system, but was instead forced to hurt other programs because the MCP decided his beliefs were wrong. The program who placed all his faith in Flynn and died because of it, because Flynn had treated the whole thing like a game and never bothered to think of what could happen to everyone else around him. The program who had been derezzed only seconds after finding out that all his beliefs were true, that he still had something to live for.

Suddenly the waking word becomes his only solace. Yet the guilt he feels is still ever-present, a solid weight on his shoulders.

Flynn is the reason Ram is dead.

So one day, sitting alone in his office, Flynn realizes that it makes sense, then, that he should be the one to get Ram back.


	2. Chapter 2

Two days after he had the thought of bringing Ram back, Flynn had downloaded every piece of remaining data from the MCP's reign (there wasn't much) and transferred it to his computer at the Arcade, behind the back of every Encom employee and Dillinger himself. Then he created a stable, linked connection between his computer and the Encom server bank.

He'd written a scanning program the day before, after hacking into a big-name insurance company and checking out their actuarial programs. Ram didn't say too much about where he was from, but he had mentioned helping people plan out their lives. Flynn decided to copy the code of six of the major programs the site used. Then he compiled them, creating a common profile for an actuarial program, and wrote the scanning program around that profile.

The scanning program had been left to run interrupted on his computer while he walked in and out of various courtrooms, fighting a long-winded legal battle to get Encom under his sole control and give Dillinger the boot permanently. Ten days later, Flynn came home from a particularly frustrating meeting about 'admissible evidence' to find he'd gotten multiple hits. Traces of code, buried so deep that if Flynn hadn't specifically looked for them they would have escaped his notice completely.

Most of the basic program was intact, but some more intricate sections were corrupted so badly that Flynn couldn't recode the damage. The chance that he'd end up rewriting Ram completely was too great. Flynn wanted his friend back, not a blank slate of a replacement. However, there was no way to find out what among the damaged and glitched parts of code had belonged to Ram and what was just random glitched strands. Add that to the fact that Kevin had never coded an actuarial program before....

And he was at a loss.

He knew Ram as a human being- sort of- not lines of code. How could he reassemble something as complex as that in two dimensions on a screen, using a keyboard? It seemed even harder than when he'd reconstructed that recognizer on the grid, which required physically seeing all those damaged bits of code and trying to piece them back together like a puzzle-

Oh.

.......

Three weeks after he takes over Encom, Flynn gives everyone a week off on paid leave.

In the wake of Dillinger's betrayal and the complete upheaval nationwide, Encom doesn't look too good press-wise. More and more stories surface about Dillinger, and various news crews kept hounding Encom employees for the full story. Even Alan got roped into an interview, in which he acknowledged the complete failure of the MCP to run things efficiently.

“It was definitely some of the worst few years of work experience,” Alan had said, nervously clenching and unclenching one hand as the pretty brunette reporter smiled encouragingly at him. “But now we have Flynn as our CEO, a man who I personally believe is not only one of the brightest programmers the world has ever seen but is also pretty well-grounded. He was previously a programmer here at Encom, and he's run his own business before. After handling an arcade full of teenagers every day a company ought to be easy for him.”

Flynn chuckles in remembrance. After the interview had been completed Alan had practically run out of the studio and into his office at Encom. He hadn't come out of his cubicle for hours and thrown popcorn at anyone who got close, and when Flynn went to talk to him, Alan flat-out refused to program anything until they had agreed that he was off-limits for interviews for the foreseeable future.

Alan could stick to his position like cement and refuse to budge for ages. Luckily, when Flynn tried to talk to the Board about giving everyone paid vacation, they were a lot less stubborn. However, when it came to actually formally agreeing on anything they kept on trying to run circles around Flynn. Which didn't really work, considering he was smarter than all of them combined. But it was frustrating.

Three hours into the last meeting about when the week off would be, Kevin had given up on playing nice and told them all that he was giving everyone at the company their week off (which included them, so they should have no reason to object) starting next Monday. And if they didn't agree, Flynn would release every sordid detail of all the hacking and stealing the MCP had done under Dillinger's control to every news station who wanted it and maybe a few government agencies too. God only knew just how illegal half of what Dillinger was doing was.

They were pretty agreeable after that.

Officially, the reason for the week off was so everyone could go home and get a temporary reprieve form the hassle of work.

Unofficially, Flynn was headed back to the Grid.


End file.
